


Choice, Sacrifice

by woodenwashbucket



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Endgame Fix-It, Except Thanos, F/M, Fix-It, I mean Tony still has a pretty bad time, More Characters mentioned, Thanos (Marvel) Dies, Timeline Shenanigans, he loses a limb and such, hey Marvel stop throwing female characters off cliffs so male characters can be sad, look if the Russos don’t have to properly explain time travel neither do I, which seems to be pretty common in Endgame fix-its
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-07 14:03:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20818493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/woodenwashbucket/pseuds/woodenwashbucket
Summary: With all six Infinity Stones, you can re-write reality however you want. The Soul Stone asks for true sacrifice. There were consequences of what Thanos did besides people turning to dust. Tony hasn’t really thought through those facts all the way.





	Choice, Sacrifice

**Author's Note:**

> I didn’t particularly like the ending of Endgame. I have addressed some of my concerns here.   
Hope you enjoy!

“I am inevitable,” Thanos says, and snaps fingers sheathed in an empty gauntlet.

Tony lifts his hand.

He is tired, he is beyond tired, out into the ragged grey stretches of exhaustion, and he is skipping over the top of it like a stone, bruising with every hit. Like Iron Man thrown by an explosion rolling over debris.

The six stones slide into place over his hand, the suit reconfiguring so, so easily even when he is this exhausted.

His sense of the dramatic musters up enough glee to flicker at him, through the grey, because _god_ it’s the best lead-in he could imagine. He’ll go out on a good line, the way only Tony Stark can. Cap might have started in show business but Tony can steal a scene like nobody else.

“And I,” he says, “am-“

He turns his hand, so the monster under his bed since before he knew it was there can see exactly what Tony has done. Exactly how Tony has won.

“Iron Man,” he finishes, and he sn-

He means to kill them all – Thanos and his whole army, wipe them out of existence. He knows it’ll kill him, he’s prepared for that. It seems fitting, somehow. Natasha and Tony, dying to save the world but really for their families. The two who can’t rest no matter how hard they try, even if Natasha’s past is nothing to Tony’s, the red in her ledger swamped by the blood on his hands, every bullet and bomb and missile he tossed to the world without even stopping to admit he didn’t care who they landed on, all his innumerable failures. And the kid, the kid is back, Peter with his bright-eyed hope and wide-eyed surprise, young enough that he hadn’t let himself understand what was happening, loving enough that his last words had been to try to make Tony feel better – Peter is _alive_ and Tony can die for that. For Pepper and Morgan and Rhodey and Happy and May and Steve and Bruce and Clint and Thor and Wanda and Shuri and Nebula and Sam and Rocket and Carol and T’Challa and Maria and -

He means to kill them all, that’s what he’s focusing on when the stones line up and their power hits him like a million volts to the chest, like a nuclear bomb in space, like a Titan’s fist.

But one of them tugs at him, just a little, and he isn’t on the battlefield anymore.

There’s a weird light coming from everywhere at once and he’s standing on top of water. He’s somewhere _else_, some other place that doesn’t play by the same rules as the observable universe, doesn’t even play by the same rules as the Quantum Realm, and Tony’s there but he can feel that he’s still back on the battlefield that used to be a compound that he’d hoped once could be a home for a family he’d tried to hold on to. He’s in that frozen moment, not an atom moving, with the static friction of his fingers just letting go, and he’s here, too.

He can feel hands on his shoulders.

Tony whips around, or he tries to, but everything is slow here, so he turns slowly. The woman with green skin lets her hand fall, but Natasha just slides hers down until she’s holding his left hand.

It takes him a moment to realize she doesn’t look like she did when he last saw her. She looks like she did when he _first_ saw her; first saw _her_, with Natalie Rushman’s hair tied back and dressed like a SHIELD agent, striding through that diner.

“Oh hey,” Tony says, and his heart is rattling in his chest with desperation and fear. “You get a new job? Psychopomp? Can’t even stop working when you’re dead, huh? Told you you should have slept more before. And you,” he turns his head. “You’re Gamora, right? Saw pictures. Listen, your sister? Quick study at paper football, you should be proud. You on the job too, or just hanging around? Because I-“

“This is the one who sacrifices himself?” Gamora asks Natasha, but it’s light and it’s teasing, and it’s aimed at him, not her.

“Tony,” says Natasha. “You have a choice.”

“I already decided to die for them,” he bites out, offended.

“That’s not necessarily the choice,” she says, and something tugs at Tony again.

It’s the place. It’s the place they’re in and it’s the stone on Tony’s hand and it’s the two dead women in front of him, looking at him and asking him to look.

Don’t change anything else, he’d told Bruce. Because how dare they take away what he’d gained? How dare they sacrifice what anyone had gained since?

But he can see, now, what Thanos did to the universe, how the snap and the aftermath and even the aftermath of what they’ve done, of bringing everyone back-

How much is Tony willing to sacrifice?

Because there are things that cannot be fixed, but sometimes they can be un-broken.

Joy did not stop existing, in these five years, but the weight of the sorrow and the weight of the unfairness press on him, and it nearly brings him to his knees. All the lives lost around the snap, all the lives lived without the people they should have been shared with, all the weight of billions and billions of parents losing their children, of people missing five years coming back to a world that has changed, and on every world it’s worse. He can see, now, with a heavy sinking, that on every world it is worse since the snap. Joy and love and all the rest of it exist, and now that the dusted are back there will be more, and things will keep getting better, but on every world it is worse that the snap happened than if it hadn’t.

How much are you willing to sacrifice, and it’s not just him asking himself.

What choices are you willing be the one to make?

There’s no expectation there, from the question. It’s not even in words. It’s just…a wanting to know. A waiting.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

“It turns out the soul stone takes more into account than we thought,” Natasha says, dryly. She smiles a little, then. The sly smile that meant you were about to learn another thing she could do. “It’s not like the other stones, it can think and make decisions. It’s not Vormir or some power there that decides who gets the stone, it’s the soul stone itself. I guess it liked us.”

“The stone respects sacrifice,” Gamora says. “We sacrificed more than the ones who took possession of the stone, so we kept some…agency.”

Tony lifts his hands and waves them impatiently.

“Ok, that is all fascinating under normal circumstances, but I need to know what’s going on _now_.”

“You have a choice, Tony,” Natasha says. “You can do what you were going to do. You can kill Thanos and his army and die there. Or, you can change things.”

The soul stone tugs at Tony again, showing him lines of possibility, a snaking, sneaky thread of multiverses branching and turning and collapsing back together into something different than any of them.

“The past can’t be changed,” Tony says. “That’s why we did what we did, you were there for that little lecture.”

“With all six Infinity Stones, anything is possible,” Gamora says. “Half the life in the universe can’t be wiped out with a gesture, either, but it was. And then brought back.”

“The paradox,” Tony says, stubbornly, and in his heart he already knows what he’s going to do. He doesn’t want to, he’s screaming against it, but he can’t do anything else now that he has seen.

How many people’s choices is he willing to make for them?

Who is he willing to sacrifice, for every world to be better?

“We’re not sure,” admits Natasha. “It’ll be tied to you, basically, but we’re not sure how. You could end up in a loop forever, or you might die, or you might lose your mind.”

“Already gone,” Tony quips, because he can’t not.

“We will help you, if we can,” Gamora says. “We’ve been in here for, well.”

“A long time,” Natasha says.

“You’ve been dead a day,” Tony tells her.

“Or nine years,” she reminds him.

“We’ve learned some things. We’ll bear what part of this burden we can,” Gamora says, and puts a hand on Tony’s right shoulder. “If that’s what you choose to do.”

“It is,” Natasha says, and puts a hand on Tony’s left shoulder, squeezes his left hand with her other. “He already decided.”

“It sounds a lot easier to just die my way out of this,” he says, flippantly. “But hey, dying doesn’t really seem to be my style.”

“Neither does doing what’s easy,” Natasha says, and smiles.

I’ve made my decision, Tony thinks and he is-

In a bedroom in a palace, watching a red gem turn into smoke and dissolve into Jane Foster’s skin-

In a trashed, eclectic, grungy museum-looking place, putting a canister on a shelf-

In the first SHIELD facility, putting a box back in a box-

On the shattered remains of a spaceship, putting a blue cube into Loki’s hand-

On a New York rooftop, handing a green gem back to a woman with knowing eyes-

On Titan, hiding a green gem sideways between layers of reality as a star-

In his Tower, putting a scepter on the floor-

Among Wakandan trees, pushing a stone back into Vision’s forehead-

In a dark stone room, putting a ball back into a crackling field of energy-

In a shattered vault in a burning city, putting a ball back onto a shelf-

On Vormir, two of it at once, layered over each other, and Natasha and Gamora are still holding his shoulders but they are also lying dead on the ground while Clint screams a denial and Thanos thinks he knows what sorrow is and Tony holds the soul stone out, offering it to itself-

And he is on Xandar, in the city he is also in while it burns, but it is not yet burning, and he tugs, just a little, on the connection he can feel in the space stone-

The branching of timelines lays spread out in front of him, and he pushes each branch back together, slotting them back and tugging each snag and snarl until all the tangles only twist the one small fragile line that is him, until everything else lays smooth and clear and the little eddy he and the others made has faded like ripples on a pond, his line snarled and tangled and everything else solid and smooth-

He is on the battlefield, staring down the mad Titan.

He snaps.

New York City. Tony is only in one place, now, jogging through the park with Pepper, the day Thanos came. But he’s not quite in only one place, not really, because he’s jogging with Pepper and he’s also trailing behind himself, half a second and half an inch out of sync with his body, and he’s not the one saying what he’s saying.

There are no longer any hands on his shoulders, but there are six burning lines of almost-pain running up his right arm, fingertip to shoulder, the not-pain of a bad burn before your nerves have had time to figure out what’s going on, the moment when you take a breath and brace because you know that’s going to hurt like _anything_ in a second.

He tells Pepper his dream, and she denies she’s pregnant, but she is, they just didn’t know it yet that day. Two weeks pregnant, they figured it later, one crumb of joy in the bleak aftermath of failure. Tony is talking but Tony is also trailing behind himself, like an afterimage, like a ghost.

Happy drives up, and they talk, and Tony waits for the portal to open. He knows when the portal opens on Strange and Bruce, he waits, here it is, and the moment passes.

The instant comes and there is no portal, because yesterday when Thanos and his army descended on Xandar, Carol Danvers was waiting and Thanos died in the wreckage of his ship with Carol’s fire blinding him and Nebula’s blade through his heart.

The instant comes, and instead of a portal opening Tony snaps back in sync with himself, and now he really is only in one place, and he cannot feel the Infinity Stones any more.

The pain hits.

There is fire, there is acid, there is electricity and ice and sharp metal and jagged stone biting into his arm, running in six lines from fingertip to shoulder and splashing out onto the rest of him and there has never been pain like this, not like this, and he just barely hears himself screaming, he just barely hears Happy yelling and Pepper yelling and then everything, as cliché as it is, goes black.

“-he’s waking up now. Please, Pepper, let me explain alone first.”

It’s Natasha’s voice.

Her voice slides in and out of focus, like the room around him as he blinks. He’s fuzzy. He’s waking up and trying to figure out what’s going on, but it’s all _fuzzy_.

Senses come and go and come and go and come and stay, one by one.

He’s lying down, in a bed. Clean sheets. Soft pillow. Gently bright light, sunlight, windows into the room and a clean smell and birdsong in the tree outside the window. White walls and medical equipment. Tired. So tired, even though he’s just waking up, like every motion, even breathing, takes all the energy he has. Pain, in his right arm and side and up the side of his neck.

Natasha’s voice, on his left.

He turns to look at her, and she smiles at him, the gentle, happy smile she had when she told him it wasn’t his style to do what’s easy.

He tries to say something, but it’s like he can’t remember how to talk, and his mouth is sticky and tastes gross.

“You’re at the Avengers compound,” Natasha tells him, gently. Her expression slides carefully into serious. “You’ve been in a coma for five years.”

Tony’s heart stutters. Literally. He can hear it on the ECG.

“I don’t know everything that happened,” she continues, “but I know something terrible happened. Thanos got the Infinity Stones and did something terrible, and you undid it and stopped him. What we saw on our end was, you collapsed in the park, and no one could figure out why. And your arm-” Natasha looks over at his right side, and Tony follows.

His right arm cannot possibly be hurting, because he doesn’t have a right arm. He barely has a right shoulder. But it is hurting, six burning lines from his fingertips up, and he has a feeling it more or less always will.

She reaches out and puts a hand on his left shoulder, where he remembers she put her hand a few minutes and five years and an entire different timeline ago. “It’s over, Tony. You saved the universe.”

Tony wants to laugh and he wants to cry and he wants to scream that this isn’t what he thought he was giving up. He was ready to die, but this? Five years of his life and a then lifetime of remembering grief that no one else does and pain in an arm that isn’t there and Morgan, what about Morgan? Does she even exist? And if she does, how much like the Morgan he sacrificed to get here is she?

If she does, she doesn’t know him. His memories of his daughter are of a daughter who doesn’t exist anymore, who never existed at all. If Morgan exists, now, she’s a stranger. She has grown up without her father.

“Mnn,” he manages.

“Morgan,” Natasha says, “has been waiting to meet you her whole life.”

A tear runs down Tony’s face, and Natasha wipes it away.

“I knew you would wake up now,” Natasha says. “I don’t really know how I know what I’ve known for the past five years. We’ll have to talk about that later. But I’ve known for five years you would wake up now, and Morgan’s been waiting ever since she was old enough to start to understand. We tell her stories about you.”

Tony manages to raise an eyebrow.

“Peter especially,” Natasha says, with a little grin. “And Steve. Everyone, but those two act like they’re the official Tony Stark PR team. Yeah, Steve is here. Everyone’s here. We knew you were waking up today, remember. We’ve got all the Avengers, Clint’s family, Harley, a whole crowd of Asgardians, a full royal delegation from Wakanda, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain Marvel, Lang and the Pym-Van Dynes, some magicians, what feels like half of SHIELD – everyone, Tony. A lot has happened in five years, but everyone who cares about you is here. And Morgan, Tony? She cares about you. A lot.”

A strange look flitters across Natasha’s face, and Tony’s eyes go wide with alarm.

“No, it’s nothing bad,” she says. “It’s just. I-“ She rubs her temple. “For the first time in five years, I don’t know anything about what comes next.”

There’s a knock at the door. Natasha looks at Tony, and he nods. She gets up and goes out of the room, leaving him alone for a breath of time before Pepper and Morgan come through the door.

“Hey Pep,” he manages to whisper. “Think I missed a dinner or two.”

Pepper has a hand to her mouth, she’s crying and she’s trying to not make any noise because the little girl in the faded Iron Man t-shirt has bounced across the room and thrown herself onto the bed.

“Hi,” he whispers.

“Hi,” she says, not shy. “I’ve been practicing what to say when you wake up.”

“That’s smart,” he tells her. “Good idea. You get that from your mom. What did you decide on?”

“I love you,” she tells him, matter-of-fact.

“I love you too,” he says, and he means it with every ache in his heart and every wobble of his spinning head.

She grins, a beaming little-girl grin that is Morgan Potts Stark all over, but is different enough that he’s never going to mix her up with the girl in his memory, and he realizes with staggering relief that he loves _her_, this girl he’s just met who has grown up with a father in a coma, he’s going to love her just as much as he ever loved the girl he saw every day of her life.

“Well,” she says, “I love you 3000.”


End file.
